World: KHE SANH: SYMBOL NO MORE

THE U.S. last week began to abandon Khe Sanh, the once idyllic valley in South Viet Nam’s northwest corner that early this year became the scene of the war’s biggest and bitterest siege. The news could hardly have been more startling. For months, the American people had been told that the base was indispensable to U.S. strategy and prestige. When its 6,200-man garrison came under siege and heavy artillery bombardment from the North Vietnamese in mid-January, some observers saw an ominous similarity to Dienbienphu. The French base had been overrun in 1954 by another North Vietnamese army under the same commander besieging Khe Sanh, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Khe Sanh thus became a symbol —justifiably or not—of U.S. determination to stick it out under heavy pressure.

And yet, scarcely half a year later, the U.S. Marines were out of the base.* Amid occasional incoming shellbursts, bulldozers clattered across the base last week, filling the red clay scars that trenches had cut into the once verdant plateau, burying the hulks of crippled aircraft, Jeeps and trucks. Dust-caked Marines stacked up the aluminum matting that had formed Khe Sanh’s 4,000-ft. runway, during the siege, its only link to the outside. Demolition men destroyed bunker after bunker, the single bit of protection against the rain of North Vietnamese steel that had lashed the base for almost half a year and cost its U.S. Marine defenders 199 dead and 1,600 wounded.

Highly Mobile. Why the change of heart about Khe Sanh? The U.S. command in Saigon explained that the tactical situation in northernmost I Corps had been altered dramatically. Whereas the North Vietnamese had the equivalent of only six divisions below the Demilitarized Zone last January, they now had eight. To counter that increased threat, U.S. commanders reasoned, the 271,000 allied forces in the area would have to be highly mobile. A fixed and exposed base like Khe Sanh would no longer make sense. That argument was sensible enough, but it came a little late. Many critics felt from the beginning that mobile tactics were called for in the Khe Sanh area, and that it was a costly mistake to have so many U.S. troops pinned down in a stationary position—even though the siege also pinned down many enemy troops and cost the North Vietnamese an estimated 10,000 casualties.

The argument about the Khe Sanh strategy will probably continue as long as the Vietnamese war is remembered. Khe Sanh had been a U.S. Special Forces camp, with the task of blocking and monitoring infiltration routes from the North. When the enemy started to besiege the camp, that function was rendered impossible. The U.S. nonetheless poured in troops, building up to some 5,700 U.S. Marines and a 500-man South Vietnamese Ranger battalion. The Marines were not anxious to make a stand there: they sat at the end of a 27-mile supply line on Communist-interdicted Highway 9, the weather was turning bad with the onset of the Northeast monsoon, and they had done little in the way of fortifying the isolated defense complex.

It was General William Westmoreland who decided that the base would have to be held. A withdrawal from North Vietnamese encirclement, difficult at best, would not only be a major political and psychological setback for the U.S., he reasoned, but would leave Quang Tri province and the cities of I Corps open to North Vietnamese attack. Before committing the U.S. fully to Khe Sanh’s defense, however, President Johnson went to the extraordinary length of extracting a written pledge from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it could be held.

Sole Lifeline. In the event, it was.

The Marines stayed, holed up in flimsy bunkers that could not withstand a direct artillery hit, encircled by North Vietnamese who held most of the high ground, continuously dazed by rocket and 130-and 152-mm. artillery barrages that dumped up to 1,500 rounds a day into the base. North Vietnamese trenches fingered up to the camp’s defensive wire. Rats infested the bunkers. Supply planes had to feel their way through rain and clouds and all-too-accurate antiaircraft fire; the hulks of downed aircraft lined the runwav.

Day after day, night after night, U.S. B-52s rumbled over the hills outside the Marine perimeter while the garrison fought off probes and small infantry assaults. By the end of the 77-day siege, the bombers had dropped more than 100,000 tons of explosives, about one-sixth the total used during all of the Korean War. The raids probably helped to prevent the big ground assault that everyone expected. The attack never came, and finally, in late March, the pressure eased. The bothersome question remained of whether Khe Sanh had been a massive diversion to pin down U.S. troops and make it easier for General Giap to attack Vietnamese cities at Tet, or whether—as General Westmoreland insisted —Tet was the diversion and Khe Sanh the main target.

Even after an allied task force of some 30,000 men eventually relieved Khe Sanh against little Communist resistance, the base continued to come under sporadic artillery fire. Route 9, its supply line to the coast, tied down two Marine battalions on anti-ambush duty. In short, Khe Sanh remained a costly place to defend. U.S. commanders now intend to move the western an chor of U.S. defenses south of the DMZ eleven miles northeastward to Landing Zone Stud, the site from which the relief of Khe Sanh, Operation Pegasus, was launched three months ago. Stud, fairly securely nestled in the Khe Sui Soi River valley and now being fortified by U.S. Seabees, has a good airstrip. Unlike Khe Sanh, it is outside the 17-mile reach of North Vietnamese artillery dug into the mountains across the Laotian border. Under the new plan, Marines equipped with borrowed helicopters will try to move fast and throw cordons around North Vietnamese in filtrating the area. They will also substitute aggressive reconnaissance patrols for the blocking role formerly held by Khe Sanh and the hill outposts that surrounded it, which are now also being abandoned. The technique has already had some success: Marine units south of Khe Sanh have interdicted a new infiltration road and killed hundreds of North Vietnamese.

Hanoi gloated that the abandonment of Khe Sanh was a “grave defeat for the United States.” The move might be a bitter comment on war and on the way in which a bravely and passionately held position can become irrelevant. But, in fact, the evacuation of the base reflects recognition of changed realities—and a return to the flexibility that has always marked U.S. military tactics.

*The decision to give up Khe Sanh had been in the making for weeks, but an embargo on the news was finally broken last week by Baltimore Sun Correspondent John Carroll, who received an indefinite suspension of his Saigon accreditation for his pains.